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mackerelgray · 4 hours ago

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Cooking question I'm too embarrassed to ask someone IRL: how easy or hard is it to accidentally poison yourself?

I know not to eat things that are too old (past the best-by date, changed color etc), I know not to eat things that were burned. I know to be careful about handling raw meat. I know how to store leftovers. I know to pay attention to instructions on the package and to check if the package is damaged etc.

But at the same time... well, a lot of cooking advice I've seen over the years includes some variation of "try things out, see what you like!" and I'd kind of like to do that. But if the results turn out inedible, I'd like them to be "inedible" as in "tastes very bad" and not "inedible" as in "going to upset your stomach" or "send you to the hospital"

If I try to cook/bake/roast/fry/whatever a food that can be eaten raw, like fruit, what are the odds that the result will be safe to eat?

What about lettuce? I'm aware it would probably taste bad, but would it be safe to try?

If I mix random liquid-y things from my pantry to make a sauce for whatever vegetables&meat I'm frying, what are the odds the result would be safe to eat? (Assuming all the components are edible by themself, I'm NOT talking about cleaning solutions or dish soap or whatever)

What might be some questions I don't even know I should check?

If I try to cook/bake/roast/fry/whatever a food that can be eaten raw, like fruit, what are the odds that the result will be safe to eat? If I mix random liquid-y things from my pantry to make a sauce for whatever vegetables&meat I'm frying, what are the odds the result would be safe to eat?

100% safe. There is a ZERO (0%) percent chance of accidentally creating a poison when cooking a safe-to-eat-raw food item.

You're not going to accidentally create a poison when you mix spices, sauces, or various edible ingredients together.

It's just not how chemistry works. With no exception I can think of, you can't take one safe-to-eat plant or animal and cook it or mix it with another in a way that will create a toxic substance.

Cooking lettuce to eat is safe. Cooking whole fruit is safe. Mixing a hundred sauces together is safe. Go for it.

I could take a sample of every single individually edible item in my fridge, pantry, and spice cabinet, blend it all into a big slurry, cook it & eat a portion of that concoction with confidence that I won't die from it. While it may be gross and taste bad, it won't actually harm me. It won't be a poison, no matter how many different types of food ingredients are tossed into the pot.

I cannot guarantee that you will never upset your stomach, because you could be sensitive to or allergic to an ingredient that I don't know about. It's not a poison to all humans, but it'd be uncomfortable to you. You can only learn about that through experience.

What CAN be dangerous:

Improper sterilization and improper technique can accidentally leave poison-producing bacteria or mold to breed when canning or fermenting foods.

Eating large amounts of a couple specific foods can be risky. There's not a lot of these, so here's a list of the big names to keep an eye on:

Cassia (common) cinnamon has a chemical that is toxic in larger quantities, but harmless in small quantities. If you eat 2 teaspoons a day, every day, you'll run into trouble. If you use Ceylon cinnamon instead, you can eat pretty much as much as you want.

Don't eat a whole nutmeg. It's wonderful when used sparingly, but can be poisonous in large amounts. Same rule as Cassia cinnamon: 2 teaspoons a day, every day, will get you into trouble. Eat less or less often.

Eating too much Liver (the organ) can cause copper toxicity and Vitamin A toxicity. It's great for you when added to a meal once a week, or a couple times a month, but shouldn't be eaten daily or in huge amounts.

Don't swallow cherry pits. They're generally harmless when swallowed whole, because they pass through digestion unscathed, but if they're crushed or cracked open first they release a compound that turns into cyanide when digested. Our body handles cyanide pretty well, but 4-5 cracked pits can become harmful. So: Don't chew them, and don't swallow them on purpose.

There are some foods which need special preparation to be made safe. They're safe COOKED, but not RAW.

Cooked beans & legumes are safe to eat. But if you're starting from a totally DRY bean or lentil (canned are pre-cooked) make sure to soak them in water for several hours and boil until they're FULLY COOKED before you eat. (Fully cooked is when you can crush them easily with a fork, with no gritty or hard center) Undercooked or uncooked beans & legumes can fuck up your guts real good. Very painful, horribly unpleasant, but probably won't kill you.

Cassava (the root vegetable that tapioca is made from) MUST be thoroughly cooked before eating. Raw cassava can be toxic. It's another cyanide bro.

Don't eat raw potatoes - always cook them. If your potatoes have sprouted, don't eat the sprouts & peel any green skin off. Tbh tho, an adult would need to eat at least a pound of green potatoes to get sick. Be reasonably cautious about it. Don't feed green potatoes to small children.

Note: This advice is intended for someone who shops at a grocery for their food, not someone who is foraging for ingredients or is growing their own. There's a lot more opportunities to poison yourself when working with whole plants in the wild, and not the prepared-for-sale ones at a store.

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mackerelgray · 4 hours ago

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In general, understanding radical feminism for what it is and why it appeals to many people requires an understanding that the greatest strength of radical feminism as a tool for understanding misogyny and sexism is also its greatest faultline.

See, radical feminism is a second wave position in feminist thought and development. It is a reaction to what we sometimes call first wave feminism, which was so focused on specific legal freedoms that we usually refer to the activists who focused on it as suffragists or suffragettes: that is, first wave feminists were thinking about explicit laws that said "women cannot do this thing, and if they try, the law of the state and of other powerful institutions will forcibly evict them." Women of that era were very focused on explicit and obvious barriers to full participation in public and civil life, because there were a lot of them: you could not vote, you could not access education, you could not be trained in certain crucial professions, you could not earn your own pay even if you decided you wanted to.

And so these activists began to try to dig into the implicit beliefs and cultural structures that served to trap women asking designated paths, even if they did wish to do other things. Why is it that woman are pressured not to go into certain high prestige fields, even if in theory no one is stopping them? How do our ideas and attitudes about sex and gender create assumptions and patterns and constrictions that leave us trapped even when the explicit chains have been removed?

The second wave of feminism, then, is what happened when the daughters of this first wave--and their opponents--looked around and said to themselves: hold on, the explicit barriers are gone. The laws that treat us as a different and lesser class of people are gone. Why doesn't it feel like I have full access to freedoms that I see the men around me enjoying? What are the unspoken laws that keep us here?

And so these activists focused on the implicit ideas that create behavioral outcomes. They looked inward to interrogate both their own beliefs and the beliefs of other people around them. They discovered many things that were real and illuminated barriers that people hadn't thought of, especially around sexual violence and rape and trauma and harassment. In particular, these activists became known for exercises like consciousness-raising, in which everyday people were encouraged to sit down and consider the ways in which their own unspoken, implicit beliefs contributed to general societal problems of sexism and misogyny.

Introspection can be so intoxicating, though, because it allows us to place ourselves at the center of the social problems that we see around us. We are all naturally a little self centered, after all. When your work is so directly tied to digging up implications and resonances from unspoken beliefs, you start getting really into drawing lines of connection from your own point of interest to other related marginalizations--and for this generation of thinkers, often people who only experienced one major marginalization got the center of attention. Compounding this is the reality that it is easier to see the impacts of marginalization when they apply directly to you, and things that apply to you seem more important.

So some of this generation of thinkers thought to themselves, hang on. Hang on. Misogyny has its fingers in so many pies that we don't see, and I can see misogyny echoing through so many other marginalizations too--homophobia especially but also racism and ableism and classism. These echoes must be because there is one central oppression that underlies all the others, and while theoretically you could have a society with no class distinctions and no race distinctions, just biologically you always have sex and gender distinctions, right? So: perhaps misogyny is the original sin of culture, the well from which all the rest of it springs. Perhaps there's really no differences in gender, only in sex, and perhaps we can reach equality if only we can figure out how to eradicate gender entirely. Perhaps misogyny is the root from which all other oppressions stem: and this group of feminists called themselves radical feminists, after that root, because radix is the Latin word for root.

Very few of this generation of thinkers, you may be unsurprised to note, actually lived under a second marginalization that was not directly entangled with sexism and gender; queerness was pretty common, but queerness is also so very hard to distinguish from gender politics anyway. It's perhaps not surprising that at this time several Black women who were interested in gender oppression became openly annoyed and frustrated by the notion that if only we can fix gender oppression, we can fix everything: they understood racism much more clearly, they were used to considering and interrogating racism and thinking deeply about it, and they thought that collapsing racism into just a facet of misogyny cheapened both things and failed to let you understand either very well. These thinkers said: no, actually, there isn't one original sin that corrupted us all, there are a host of sins humans are prone to, and hey, isn't the concept of original sin just a little bit Christianocentric anyway?

And from these thinkers we see intersectional feminists appearing. These are the third wave, and from this point much mainstream feminist throughout moves to asking: okay, so how do the intersections of misogyny make it appear differently in all these different marginalized contexts? What does misogyny do in response to racial oppression? What does it look like against this background, or that one?

But the radical feminists remained, because seeing your own problems and your own thought processes as the center of the entire world and the answer to the entire problem of justice is very seductive indeed. And they felt left behind and got quite angry about this, and cast about for ways to feel relevant without having to decenter themselves. And, well, trans women were right there, and they made such a convenient target...

That's what a TERF is.

Now you know.

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mackerelgray · 4 hours ago

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What can baleen whales even DO about orca whales. Like can they even fight back. Imagine being a huge fat floating mass of delicious meat living in an open void with no shelter to retreat to and there are these mouth torpedos that might just decide to show up and rip you open just whenever.

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mackerelgray · 5 hours ago

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posting my fax machine thing sona here for posterity :]

its name is fax, it's like 5'5 and it's got a bouncy cord tail. it prints new ears to express emotions :]

it will bluescreen for a second if u catch it off guard

#ohhhhh what a precious beastie. fax i love u

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mackerelgray · 5 hours ago

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trhey are. good for my health

(transcript under the cut)

From MAG 162:

TIM (Jon impression) Well, given the incoherence of this statement, I find it hard to believe it ever occurred. [Sasha laughs.] TIM In fact, based on the evidence, I find it highly unlikely that Sasha ever even existed at all.

Also 162

MARTIN (put-upon Spooky Jon impression) What good are maps when the very Earth has… eh, blah blah blah. ARCHIVIST Well, yes.

From 167:

MARTIN You know, when you do the whole – (Spooky Jon impression) curse this flesh prison – (normal) thing, it –

From 108:

BASIRA Was he… woOoOo? MARTIN I mean, a bit, yeah.

From 117:

MARTIN “(Jon voice) Good lord, is Martin becoming some sort of spider person?”

From 39:

TIM Statement of Joe Spooky, regarding sinister happenings-

From 85:

ARCHIVIST “Face to face with your own mortality on the frozen peaks, staring death in the face and saying ‘Not today, dude.’”

From 88:

MARTIN She said she had (heavy air quotes) “full operational discretion”.

From 98:

MARTIN Jon’s (Elias voice) “too inconsistent” at the moment.

From 136:

ARCHIVIST I-I’m not swanning around – DAISY (OVERLAPPING) “Boo-hoo, I’m so alone and a monster.” ARCHIVIST I –

#tma #love these blorbos <3

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mackerelgray · 5 hours ago

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D/s and Emotional Needs

This post is basically a transcript of a speech I give to newbies to the D/s scene all the time IRL. I figured it might be useful not only to people curious about kink IRL but also to smut writers here on the smut writing website.

For the purposes of this post, I am sending specific physical acts out of the room. Right now they don't matter, because you can meet an emotional need through any number of physical acts. So when I say that there are many ways to dom and many ways to sub, I am not referring to many kinds of physical acts. I mean that there are many emotional needs that doms and subs bring to scenes, and those can change the scene more than the choice of physical acts that will occur in that scene.

I say this to newbies to the scene because they tend to have a narrow view of the motivations and needs that bring people to D/s, biased by both the newbie's own preferences and the depictions of D/s they've seen in media. The same is true of people who write kink fic. Kink fic is very biased to a narrow subset of the wide range of emotional needs that people might bring to this kind of play.

It's really important to understand this in D/s IRL because a mismatch or miscommunication about these needs can lead to a bad scene. For example, let's take the approaches of sub-as-beloved-pet and sub-as-object. If a dom treats a sub as a beloved pet when what they really want is to be treated like an object, then a sub who went into a scene needing to be ignored, or at the very least the illusion of being ignored and disregarded, is suddenly in the spotlight of a lot of intense attention and affection. Again, I will note that both of these scenes could potentially involve the same physical acts, just approached differently. Let's say it's a service submission scene where the sub is naked and cleaning the room for the dom. Sub-as-beloved-pet would get frequent praise and lots of patiently repeated instructions, while sub-as-object would get one detailed instruction at the beginning and no reinforcement except a punishment if they get part of the instruction wrong.

I'm going to go through a bunch of different styles of dom and sub, with the emotional needs that underlie them. This list is not exhaustive. I'm sure there's more I haven't thought of or encountered, so feel free to reblog with additions. It may also be a bit dom-biased because I'm a dom, but I think that might be for the best, because the emotional needs of doms are generally less understood than those of subs.

Various consensual kinks discussed below. Kinkshamers in the notes will be blocked with extreme prejudice.

Dom-as-control: This may seem obvious or even trivial, but it shouldn't be dismissed: many doms are motivated by an emotional need to have some part of their life where they have total control over what is going to happen. Something that I love about this style of domination is that I always know exactly what will happen next (except if there's some emergency, safeword, or other issue to address.) There are no wild cards in a controlled D/s scene except for those I explicitly allow (like if I ask a sub to choose which whip I'll beat them with.) This is also a reason why I personally have a very hard time switching; I have difficulty with the uncertainty of not knowing what will happen next. It should be noted that this style of domination is fairly incompatible with the bratty style of submission, as the brat is constantly throwing wild cards into the scene.

Sub-as-blankspace: The other side of this coin is the sub who needs to not have to think anymore. They've spent all day deciding what to wear and what to eat and which toothpaste to buy and they just want to stop. This is a very common motivator. This sub needs specific and clear commands from a dom, without too many steps, or else needs to have a well-established protocol of kneeling and service that they can do by pure muscle memory. This sub does not want the dom to offer them a choice of whips they can be beaten with, because that forces them out of the blissful blankspace of not needing to choose.

Dom- or sub-as-service: The same emotional need can sometimes motivate domination or submission! Many people dom or sub out of a desire to please their partner. It's about taking on a defined role that you know will meet your partner's needs. It feels good to be needed, after all. This motivation for D/s is generally the best understood by the public, especially as a motivation for doms. It's generally more socially acceptable to want to control and torment people if you're doing it selflessly in order to please them. A big part of my motivation for making this speech to people, and for writing this post, is to point out that this is far from the only style of domination, and pleasing their subs is far from the only emotional need that doms might have.

Dom-as-whumper: I'm using this terminology because of the website I'm on. I'm not into whumpfic, but I recognize in people who have a visceral need to see their blorbos whimpering and bleeding the same need I have to tear apart a cute kitten with my bare hands, or to crush a sub beneath my booted foot. It's the cuteness aggression approach to domination: sometimes your sub is so cute your hands itch with the urge to destroy them. This is where domination and sadism bleed into each other; this style of domination does not work well for the sub who wants to submit without being hurt or humiliated.

Sub-as-object: Subs who like to be treated as furniture, robots, or objects are often motivated by a need to enjoy a sexual or kink situation while being free of attention and scrutiny. Obviously, some baseline level of attention is needed for BDSM safety; the dom needs to be able to notice if the sub is injured or upset. But beyond that baseline, it can feel very freeing for a sub to be turned on, blissed out in subspace, crying, drooling, whatever, without anyone closely watching or listening to them, so long as they fulfill whatever their purpose as an object is.

Sub- or dom-as-flex: Both doms and subs can be motivated by a need to feel competent. I definitely feel awesomely powerful and competent when I do a style of domination that requires specialized skill, such as hypnosis. Submission can also provide a feeling of competence: look how long I was able to stay kneeling on the hard floor! Look how perfectly I cleaned the room, exactly as Mistress told me to do it!

Dom-as-troll (or mad scientist): The sibling to this kind of dom is the writer who thinks "wouldn't it be fucked up if....?" and then writes a freaky nasty little horror story about it. A great thing about D/s is that you can have a thought like "wouldn't it be fucked up if I tied up my sub and then ate their favorite snack right in front of them?" and then you can just do it (provided you know your sub likes to be tied up and tormented.) Then you can find out how your sub would react to your terrible ideas and laugh evilly at the results. The emotional need being served here is the goblin part of your brain that wants to break things just to see how they shatter. All you need to do is find someone who wants to be broken.

Sub-as-brat: Brats are often discussed as a single type of sub, but in my experience, there are two rather different emotional needs that drive brats. Some people are brats because they need the assurance that they can act out all they want, and it won't derail the action; the dom is strong or skilled enough to subdue them no matter what nasty tricks their goblin brain gets up to. Other people are brats out of a need to live in a predictable and fair moral universe. Those brats want a very clear system of rules and punishments for those rules. Then they test the rules, and they get meted out exactly the punishment they were promised. Within the world of this scene, the world is fair, and the same misbehavior will always face the same consequences, something that rarely happens in the real world. These types of brats are rather different, because the first kind of brat doesn't care as much if the consequences of their misbehavior are inconsistent, while the second kind cares a lot.

Sub-as-beloved-pet: Or beloved child, if they're an ageplayer. I find that subs that like to be a beloved puppy are driven by an emotional need to be loved, treasured, and supported unconditionally, even if they make mistakes, even if they behave messily or clumsily, even if they look silly, because that's how a good pet owner should treat a pet. There might be discipline involved, but the discipline is very supportive and patient.

Dom-as-nurturer: Some doms are motivated by a need to be in a nurturing role that their non-D/s life may not allow them to fulfill. For example, a man who wants to express affection and tenderness to his partner but has a hard time doing so because of the way he was raised may be able to unlock that ability if his partner plays a sweet puppy and he's playing the puppy's doting owner. Basically, the D/s scene creates a little world and a set of roles in which it's expected and normal for the dom to be nurturing, even if that's not true for the dom outside of that scene.

Dom-as-enfant-terrible: The other side of the coin is a dom who needs to be in a role where they can be unreasonable, demanding, and selfish, a role that their non-D/s life may not allow them to fulfill. For example, a mother who spends all day thinking about her family's needs may relish the opportunity to center her own desires without worrying if she's being "too much." She can be impatient and fussy and demand the sub do things over and over until she's satisfied, all of which she can't do when she's working as a teacher or other caring role.

Dom-as-artist: I think this is a hugely under-appreciated motivator for doms. Many have a need to be creative and imaginative that they fulfill through domination. I've been to workshops and demos at kink conventions where I've been awed by another dom's fiendish creativity. I once watched a hypno dom with a sub who got off on being afraid, and he hypnotized her and crafted an extremely elaborate horror scene in the room, filling it with menacing shadows and phantasms. This is where I'm contractually obligated to link A Dom DM because this is where domination overlaps a lot with game running and game design.

Sub-as-aesthetic-object: The flip side of this coin is that many subs enjoy being an aesthetic object or canvas for a dom's art. Very often these are subs chasing a need to feel beautiful, or at least enjoyable to look at. Subs who want to be aesthetic objects may enjoy wearing special outfits during scenes, or being posed in sexy or appealing positions. Subs in this kind of scene may enjoy letting go of worrying about whether they look good to the dom, because the dom is shaping them to their own preferred aesthetic, whether that's via poses, makeup, shibari, or something else.

Sub-as-sexual-creature: A lot of subs enjoy being called sluts, offered up for free use, or otherwise being hypersexualized. Why is that? Well, our society has a lot of shame and repression around sex, and it can feel much easier to relax and enjoy sex if it's couched in the fantasy that you have no choice because you've been reduced to a purely sexual creature. The sub has an emotional need to give up responsibility for choosing to have sex and be sexual, because that responsibility is a heavy weight to carry.

Dom- or sub-as-taboo-breaker: This is a huge motivator for both doms and subs. We all live in a society, and sometimes we feel a need to break the rules of that society. Both domination and submission provide opportunities to do so. It's taboo to piss yourself as an adult, but a watersports scene creates a space where it is acceptable or even desirable for a sub to break that taboo. As a dom, I personally get a huge taboo-breaking thrill from slapping a sub across the face. There's something about the sheer disrespect of it, and the memory of being scolded for doing it as a child, that fills me with impish glee.

Dom-as-hunter/sub-as-prey: For the hunter to catch the prey, there must first be a chase, or at the very least an ambush. This need not be a literal chase (we sent physical acts out of the room, remember?) but it is a dynamic to hunter/prey-flavored BDSM: the hunter has to earn it. This fulfills an emotional need for both dom and sub: a dom who struggles with feelings of unworthiness can feel like they've earned their partner's submission, and a sub can feel that the dom cares enough to put in the effort to catch them. Hunter/prey also allows dom and sub to explore some pretty dark emotions within the safety of consensual kink, such as fear, obsession, and consumption.

Dom-as-shadow: I mean shadow here in the sense of shadow work. Many doms take inspiration from people who bullied them in school (and many subs enjoy re-enacting scenes of childhood bullying in a safe and consensual context.) There is a real emotional need served by claiming the power of those bullies for yourself. Those childhood cruelties can be utterly transformed by the change of context. For example, the catty whispers and sneers of straight girls who bullied me for being queer comes out very different when I perform those same catty sneers as a genderfucky adult.

Sub-as-lesser-being: While some subs like to be beloved pets, and others like to be disregarded objects, some like to be pond scum. There can be a real freedom that comes from occupying a role of being disgusting and horrible. Nothing good or useful can be expected of you, and nothing you do will ever earn praise, and so you're free from worrying about or pursuing any of those things. Sub-as-lesser-being is also a space to explore difficult emotions like shame and humiliation in a safe context.

#kink

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